WD My Passport Edge 500GB Portable Hard Drive Review

Test System and Drive Info

Before we look at the numbers, here is a brief glance at the test system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. All benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running.

Intel Z77 Test Platform

The Intel Z77 platform that we used to test the WD My Passport Edge portable hard drive was running the ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe motherboard with BIOS 408 that came out on 4/12/2012. The Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz memory kit was set to 1866MHz with 1.5v and 9-10-9-27 1T memory timings. This mainboard uses both an Intel and ASMedia USB 3.0 controller for the USB 3.0 headers. We ran driver version v1.0.4.220 (4/16/2012) on the Intel controller and ASMeda driver v1.14.3.0. We tested on both controllers, but found that the performance results were the same as the performance bottleneck was the hard drive and not the USB 3.0 interface.

I fired up HD Tune Pro to take a look at the health of the drive and to see the drive attributes. I noticed that the drive features a 1MB alignment out of the box on a NTFS file system. I also noticed that WD is using a 5400 RPM 2.5″ SATA notebook hard drive inside with 8 MB of cache and firmware version 01.01A01.

Detailed Information with CrystalDiskInfo 5.0.5:

I also fired up CrystalDiskInfo and it showed basically the same information, but I know some readers prefer one over the other, so both were included.